Books

Cornwell keeping character up-to-date

NEW YORK — Patricia Cornwell never runs out of ideas for her intrepid forensic investigator, Kay Scarpetta.

“Cybercrime is now a really big deal, and so Scarpetta is inevitably going to get involved in crimes that have to do with the Internet or the high technology with communications,” the best-selling author said recently.

“I also have to look at the types of weapons that are available now because those might be used in one of her cases — whether an extremely high-tech firearm or . . . a very bizarre knife . . . or poison.”

The recently published 21st Scarpetta novel, Dust, begins with the discovery of the body of a young woman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

On her body is a mysterious residue — dust that becomes colorfully visible under ultraviolet light and leads Scarpetta on a frightening hunt for the truth.

The plot is imaginary, but the book includes references to crimes that made headlines.

The 2012 school shootings in Newtown, Conn., happened while Cornwell was working on Dust, and when the author realized they took place near Scarpetta’s fictional office, she made sure that Scarpetta volunteered to help at the crime scene.

Dust also references the Wall Street scandals of recent years. The murder victim had a pending lawsuit against her former financial managers. The legal battle draws from Cornwell’s experience of suing a financial firm and being awarded almost $51 million by a federal jury this year.

“I think there’s been a lot of people in our society who have been appalled by the abuses in the financial industry,” said Cornwell, 57.

“Some bad guys get met with poetic justice, you might say, in the end. And I think she (Scarpetta) found it quite gratifying. And maybe I did, too.”

Cornwell wrote a controversial book in 2002 that purported to solve the mystery of Jack the Ripper’s identity, and she closely follows modern stories — from the murder of JonBenet Ramsey to the trial of Casey Anthony.

She thinks the Amanda Knox case in Italy is an example of a poorly investigated crime, rejecting speculation that British exchange student Meredith Kercher was killed as part of a sexual ritual. (Knox and then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were jailed, then freed; they are to be tried again.)

“The case is not the elaborate scenario it’s been spun to be,” Cornwell said. “Instead, it’s more a sexual predator who went after this woman and tried to rape her, or did. And it’s a very violent assault.”

Cornwell also keeps up on crime fiction and recently reread Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs. She has found the carnivorous Hannibal Lecter to be less frightening than the perpetrators of recent mass shootings in Newtown; Aurora, Colo.; and elsewhere.

“This is going to sound crazy,” she said, “but, when you’ve got a serial killer of a psychopath like a Hannibal Lecter type of monster, they usually at least have some feelings about their victims — even if it’s an object they have a compulsion about or whether it might even be a hatred — as opposed to total desensitization, where these people are almost like something in a video game, when you care nothing about anybody.”